1 00:00:00,060 --> 00:00:07,200 If you hold your hand, close your face. You will obviously see it. 2 00:00:07,200 --> 00:00:13,110 But you will see what is just beyond in greater focus. 3 00:00:13,110 --> 00:00:24,180 You need to pull your hand back from your eyes until it comes into focus, which is for me about right there. 4 00:00:24,180 --> 00:00:31,970 There is where I can see my hand, but there is also where the background becomes blurred. 5 00:00:31,970 --> 00:00:38,330 Thus, each one of us can see and not see all at the same time. 6 00:00:38,330 --> 00:00:47,690 And that is why it is said that vision is the most alienating of the senses because we cannot see everything at once. 7 00:00:47,690 --> 00:00:55,440 There is always something we cannot see. In my first lecture, 8 00:00:55,440 --> 00:01:00,330 I proposed that the notion of an American body is one that is difficult to 9 00:01:00,330 --> 00:01:07,290 envision and that this has been the case for almost two hundred and fifty years. 10 00:01:07,290 --> 00:01:17,430 When the United States separated from Britain in 1776, there were no ready metaphors for how to embody the new nation. 11 00:01:17,430 --> 00:01:24,840 And this is large in part because the colonies comprehended themselves as parts of the British body. 12 00:01:24,840 --> 00:01:32,520 The king's body, a regal body whose limbs were being painfully severed. 13 00:01:32,520 --> 00:01:34,140 Painful, too, for the colonists. 14 00:01:34,140 --> 00:01:45,660 I might add not because they had to start over, but instead because they had to make an image out of something they had themselves destroyed. 15 00:01:45,660 --> 00:01:56,190 And so the intercessors rushed in the great history painter Benjamin West, the lone American who served as a court painter to King George. 16 00:01:56,190 --> 00:02:03,510 The third suggested the body of a Native American person to represent the continent. 17 00:02:03,510 --> 00:02:08,940 But this was problematic because it was two obviously different, 18 00:02:08,940 --> 00:02:19,250 and the frontiers between white settlement and indigenous sovereignty were still tentative and contentious. 19 00:02:19,250 --> 00:02:29,840 Others suggested animals to symbolise the country marvelling at the range and difference of species in North America. 20 00:02:29,840 --> 00:02:35,360 Benjamin Franklin offered the body of a snake a humble image, to be sure, 21 00:02:35,360 --> 00:02:43,190 but a remarkable animal that regrows where it is severed always whole, even when it is fractured. 22 00:02:43,190 --> 00:02:46,010 Flying squirrels were also popular, 23 00:02:46,010 --> 00:03:00,500 and so were the bald eagle and the turkey that the American people would be represented in the body of their president was not a foregone conclusion. 24 00:03:00,500 --> 00:03:07,580 George Washington, of course, was widely admired for what the public knew of his military success, 25 00:03:07,580 --> 00:03:16,400 and he was named even during his presidency as the Potter Patrie a. the father of the nation. 26 00:03:16,400 --> 00:03:23,480 But as a separate matter, there was little consensus about what a president was to the letter of the law, 27 00:03:23,480 --> 00:03:29,630 much less what it could symbolise in the larger sense. 28 00:03:29,630 --> 00:03:39,050 Was a president like a king by another title or a benevolent dictator like the Roman Cincinnatus? 29 00:03:39,050 --> 00:03:44,600 Was he supposed to keep his profession and rule the country on the side? 30 00:03:44,600 --> 00:03:50,250 Was he fit to rule? If he did not have property or slaves? 31 00:03:50,250 --> 00:03:58,800 The sovereignty of the states was another issue would each state have its own president or something else? 32 00:03:58,800 --> 00:04:05,850 And would the states bowed to the authority of the president of the United States? 33 00:04:05,850 --> 00:04:16,860 These issues were many vast and complex, and the American people for a brief time were fairly ambivalent. 34 00:04:16,860 --> 00:04:23,190 The first representation of George Washington as a symbol of the entire nation is not. 35 00:04:23,190 --> 00:04:28,550 I am certain when you are thinking of it, is this. 36 00:04:28,550 --> 00:04:36,620 The city of Washington, designed by Pier Lawful Lawful, was an interesting man for the job. 37 00:04:36,620 --> 00:04:40,250 He was French, a Parisian court painter to King Louis, 38 00:04:40,250 --> 00:04:46,520 the beloved who left France to enlist in the Continental Army and fight against the 39 00:04:46,520 --> 00:04:53,900 British during the American Revolution in 1790 and at the suggestion of the president, 40 00:04:53,900 --> 00:05:08,300 George Washington. U.S. Congress designated a compact 100 square miles of riverside land to serve as the new nation's permanent capital. 41 00:05:08,300 --> 00:05:15,230 The land was donated by the state of Maryland, encapsulating the existing city of Georgetown. 42 00:05:15,230 --> 00:05:26,450 A different George. Your George. Not ours. Across the Potomac, from the thriving slave port of Alexandria in the Commonwealth of Virginia, 43 00:05:26,450 --> 00:05:38,190 Washington's estate, Mt. Vernon included a working plantation and enslaved labourers and its 15 miles south. 44 00:05:38,190 --> 00:05:46,670 The plan for the capital city unfolded according to debates, in a newly formed and contentious Congress. 45 00:05:46,670 --> 00:05:53,450 Thomas Jefferson was against any new city because he was principally concerned for the will of the people, 46 00:05:53,450 --> 00:06:03,590 and thus he argued any new development should naturally follow the contours of the existing city of Georgetown. 47 00:06:03,590 --> 00:06:10,370 In the end, though, Full appeased Jefferson's demand for a democratic arrangement of space. 48 00:06:10,370 --> 00:06:19,010 By laying out the city according to a grid. Since equally spaced rectangles. 49 00:06:19,010 --> 00:06:30,750 Seemed rational and fair. But the federal faction in Congress saw a capital city that would rival European court life. 50 00:06:30,750 --> 00:06:44,430 This was LaFalce bailiwick, to be sure. So he designed an axial web of grand allays to be superimposed over the grid wide avenues 51 00:06:44,430 --> 00:06:51,750 with sight lines that could accommodate views of uninterrupted military parades. 52 00:06:51,750 --> 00:06:58,650 He conceived of the National Mall, a wide strip of land connecting the U.S. Congress, 53 00:06:58,650 --> 00:07:03,480 building with the president's palace later to be called the White House, 54 00:07:03,480 --> 00:07:11,790 to be a raised lawn on which the president would process imperially back and forth. 55 00:07:11,790 --> 00:07:19,770 The awkward meeting points between the rectilinear grid and the diagonal axes were to law fall, 56 00:07:19,770 --> 00:07:32,690 intended as empty spaces that would eventually hold monuments for the assurance successes of a country whose history was still unfolding. 57 00:07:32,690 --> 00:07:36,620 Now, as someone who's lived in Washington for 10 years, 58 00:07:36,620 --> 00:07:46,430 I will be the first to attest to the fact that the long phone plan is a miserable failure, impossible to navigate. 59 00:07:46,430 --> 00:08:00,620 Low fall. Poor guy was fired. Who in their right mind would join together an 18th century city to an arkless grid, to the grandest aspirations of S.I. 60 00:08:00,620 --> 00:08:12,990 And yet this bizarre hybrid was the first real symbolic representation of Washington whose name it bears. 61 00:08:12,990 --> 00:08:21,370 Work on the construction of the new Washington was slow to start and be set by political consternation. 62 00:08:21,370 --> 00:08:30,400 But one crucial thing happened to refresh American energies in favour of the capital city. 63 00:08:30,400 --> 00:08:38,900 On December 14th, 1799, George Washington died. 64 00:08:38,900 --> 00:08:45,200 What ensued was a massive outpouring of public support for the first president. 65 00:08:45,200 --> 00:08:54,230 A rush of unifying enthusiasm heretofore unheard of in the nation's short history. 66 00:08:54,230 --> 00:09:03,860 U.S. Congress held a recess on the day of his funeral, led by the example of the then first lady Abigail Adams, 67 00:09:03,860 --> 00:09:10,790 a woman so popular and outgoing that both critics and supporters called her Mrs. President. 68 00:09:10,790 --> 00:09:18,500 High society. Women around the nation went into a year of formal mourning for Washington. 69 00:09:18,500 --> 00:09:26,570 Tributes came even from around the world in a significant gesture to the young United States. 70 00:09:26,570 --> 00:09:42,170 The Royal Navy's battleships lowered their colours and thus, in the absence of Washington's real body, came the urgency to visualise it once more. 71 00:09:42,170 --> 00:09:48,530 The favourite, George Washington, was to appear as not too strong like a king. 72 00:09:48,530 --> 00:09:53,720 Americans were decidedly over that idea, but not too weak. 73 00:09:53,720 --> 00:10:04,310 He needed to personify the strength of the federal republic that was already confidently marching westward in its grasp of the entire continent. 74 00:10:04,310 --> 00:10:13,420 Instead, the favoured representation of Washington in the early 19th century imaginary was this. 75 00:10:13,420 --> 00:10:20,630 The Gilbert Stuart Athenian portrait painted in 1796, 76 00:10:20,630 --> 00:10:33,200 one painted during the president's lifetime and famously memorialised by the U.S. Treasury on its currency starting in 1869. 77 00:10:33,200 --> 00:10:41,210 This painting has the body that Americans wished to see for themselves first. 78 00:10:41,210 --> 00:10:45,590 It was understood to have an honest facial expression. 79 00:10:45,590 --> 00:10:57,200 A slight blush in the cheeks conveyed sincerity as though the president were unable to erect a false facade of his true emotion. 80 00:10:57,200 --> 00:11:02,880 His widened jaw conveyed patience, determination and control. 81 00:11:02,880 --> 00:11:15,370 The downcast stare. Read to the viewer as though Washington were in the presence of a moral exemplar, conveying modesty and deference in one glance. 82 00:11:15,370 --> 00:11:24,640 And most importantly, the unfinished quality of the portrait invites the viewer to complete it himself within his own 83 00:11:24,640 --> 00:11:34,540 imagination of what the ideal George and therefore the ideal American should be in the eighteen thirties. 84 00:11:34,540 --> 00:11:46,280 One journalist said it is the mirror for the image itself, reproducing the very virtues in themselves. 85 00:11:46,280 --> 00:11:55,040 Unlike the urban Washington, D.C., Stewart's portrait is intended as a literal illustration. 86 00:11:55,040 --> 00:12:02,510 However, I would like to suggest that it is also, in its own way, abstract, 87 00:12:02,510 --> 00:12:16,040 owing to its close association with increasingly popularised images of Washington's profile on hard currency even before its appearance. 88 00:12:16,040 --> 00:12:26,540 On the one dollar bill, Stewart's portrait was also subject to an astonishing circulation in print. 89 00:12:26,540 --> 00:12:36,140 Stewart had left his portrait unfinished because it was a template not only for later paintings of his own, 90 00:12:36,140 --> 00:12:50,270 but also for countless renderings as print engravings serving a popular market eager to purchase commercialised images of the first president. 91 00:12:50,270 --> 00:12:58,160 One of the roles of fiat money is to stabilise the abstraction of monetary value. 92 00:12:58,160 --> 00:13:06,350 To give it a unitary form and reduce the volatility inherent in a transaction. 93 00:13:06,350 --> 00:13:13,850 The Athenian portrait, while not actually money, is likewise numismatic. 94 00:13:13,850 --> 00:13:20,570 It represents American socio political cohesion across time and space. 95 00:13:20,570 --> 00:13:29,690 Its appearance as cash later in history only reinforces this role. 96 00:13:29,690 --> 00:13:36,050 After Stuart's portrait, Emanuel voices George Washington crossing the Delaware. 97 00:13:36,050 --> 00:13:49,100 Is the image of the first president enshrined in the American imagination, a gleaming symbol of American unity and rebellion against tyranny? 98 00:13:49,100 --> 00:13:53,660 Lloyd's cuts an interesting figure in American art history. 99 00:13:53,660 --> 00:14:06,590 He was born in Germany, emigrated to America in 1840, but moved back to Germany in 1841 to study painting in Dusseldorf. 100 00:14:06,590 --> 00:14:17,180 There, he espoused a concept of romanticised history painting current in the German school aligned with notions of a progressive, 101 00:14:17,180 --> 00:14:23,890 universal history rooted in the philosophies of Conte and Heikal. 102 00:14:23,890 --> 00:14:36,080 In this, Duesseldorf differed from the cyclical model of history, which I addressed in my first lecture on the American landscape painter Thomas Cole. 103 00:14:36,080 --> 00:14:43,670 For coal, the fall of civilisation was a warning against decadence and wealth. 104 00:14:43,670 --> 00:14:54,150 But Loyiso took a different tack, one that was reactive to the 1848 political revolutions sweeping Europe. 105 00:14:54,150 --> 00:15:02,250 The rises and downfalls of nations corresponded to embedded national character. 106 00:15:02,250 --> 00:15:03,540 To him, 107 00:15:03,540 --> 00:15:17,760 America was the most inspiring modern nation because its success as such was borne out of a revolution against oppressors and therefore also to him. 108 00:15:17,760 --> 00:15:23,100 George Washington symbolised nothing, if not the whole esprit de corps. 109 00:15:23,100 --> 00:15:31,480 The spirit of the entire people. We must momentarily leave to this side. 110 00:15:31,480 --> 00:15:35,060 Then neither Htay of Lloyd says Romanticism. 111 00:15:35,060 --> 00:15:45,830 If only to see Washington crossing the Delaware simply for what it is at an impressively large 12 and a half by 21 feet, 112 00:15:45,830 --> 00:15:54,080 it is virtually the size of an entire wall with a highly artistic and exciting composition. 113 00:15:54,080 --> 00:15:59,900 The subject is General Washington's leadership of the Continental Army. 114 00:15:59,900 --> 00:16:06,710 Across the treacherously icy Delaware River on Christmas Day 1776, 115 00:16:06,710 --> 00:16:14,760 en route to a surprise attack on the Heshan garrison at the Battle of Trenton, New Jersey. 116 00:16:14,760 --> 00:16:20,820 The event in history is cemented as the turning point in the war. 117 00:16:20,820 --> 00:16:33,590 Evidence of Washington's expert supervision of military forces and his ability to exhort the rangy and exhausted troops to victory. 118 00:16:33,590 --> 00:16:38,340 In its emotionality, Loyd's spared no expense. 119 00:16:38,340 --> 00:16:49,470 The statuesque Washington stands erect in an improbably tiny vessel enveloped in what we can only guess is divine light, 120 00:16:49,470 --> 00:16:55,200 illuminating the national mission during a night-time crossing. 121 00:16:55,200 --> 00:17:02,820 As his men scramble to fall in line, of course, historical accuracy was not. 122 00:17:02,820 --> 00:17:13,150 Lloyd's is calling. Owing to the artist's idealistic views of the progressive nature of civilisation, 123 00:17:13,150 --> 00:17:22,690 the painting was a resounding tribute to both American freedom and American character. 124 00:17:22,690 --> 00:17:30,430 I'm sure, as you can imagine, when it was displayed in New York, it was a spectacular success. 125 00:17:30,430 --> 00:17:40,000 Within a year, the picture was prepared as a line engraving by the well-known French company computer VIDAZA. 126 00:17:40,000 --> 00:17:49,240 And that print version is the one that found its way into virtually every 19th century American parlour. 127 00:17:49,240 --> 00:18:01,460 For the next 70 years at least. Lloyd's is painting gave all Americans the right George at the right time. 128 00:18:01,460 --> 00:18:09,950 And I say all Americans, because by 1850, the American body was shifting, changing. 129 00:18:09,950 --> 00:18:21,690 It was breaking. By then, most knew that the relationship between the north and south was polarised beyond repair. 130 00:18:21,690 --> 00:18:29,850 Patriotism in the north sensed its inheritance of American values to be rooted in New England, 131 00:18:29,850 --> 00:18:39,350 including personal liberty and suffrage, which were sharply at odds with the institution of slavery. 132 00:18:39,350 --> 00:18:49,700 Patriotism in the South aligned itself with the American revolutionary confidence to overthrow a despotic government, 133 00:18:49,700 --> 00:18:55,940 which they increasingly compared to the North's demands for abolition. 134 00:18:55,940 --> 00:19:08,580 Strangely enough, both north and south then could see themselves reflected in voices inspiring painting without a second guess. 135 00:19:08,580 --> 00:19:22,380 The ability of both sides to appeal to a shared national iconography of the revolution lubricated the re-entry of the defeated South into the union. 136 00:19:22,380 --> 00:19:31,560 At the conclusion of the civil war. But then something changed. 137 00:19:31,560 --> 00:19:42,270 The Washington that was so bright in the eyes of grandparents seemed altogether less interesting to their grandchildren. 138 00:19:42,270 --> 00:19:49,410 Washington began to disappear, or at least the Washington Americans knew. 139 00:19:49,410 --> 00:19:56,470 Humble, honest but unconquerable began to fade. 140 00:19:56,470 --> 00:20:05,080 New biographies of the first president, such as WB Woodward's book, published in 1923, 141 00:20:05,080 --> 00:20:15,850 disproved cherished stories about Washington's honesty and virtue, origin myths now taken to be totally old fashioned. 142 00:20:15,850 --> 00:20:25,730 Americans in the Jazz Age were delighted to read in the papers about scandals, and Washington was outed as the most scandalous of all. 143 00:20:25,730 --> 00:20:35,350 A drunk, a womaniser, a gambler and a dancer. He couldn't stand to read a book and he couldn't even spell. 144 00:20:35,350 --> 00:20:41,380 Inasmuch as these descriptions make Washington into an object of mockery, 145 00:20:41,380 --> 00:20:48,790 they also make him into a flamboyant every man, The Great Gatsby of the revolution, 146 00:20:48,790 --> 00:20:54,820 even the more temperate biographers throughout the 1920s and 30s, 147 00:20:54,820 --> 00:21:03,380 acknowledged that Washington's life had been romanticised throughout the 19th century. 148 00:21:03,380 --> 00:21:15,010 It's not that there wasn't any interest left in the founding father, but that what made him an interesting story had changed. 149 00:21:15,010 --> 00:21:24,770 Here is one entertaining example. The painter, Grant Wood, best known for his 1930 painting American Gothic, typifies the shift. 150 00:21:24,770 --> 00:21:31,370 And here I also show his 1932 Daughters of the Revolution taking its title from 151 00:21:31,370 --> 00:21:37,220 a conservative American women's organisation popularly known as the D.A. R., 152 00:21:37,220 --> 00:21:48,310 whose eligibility for membership is determined by establishing an authentic genealogical connexion to Revolutionary War soldier. 153 00:21:48,310 --> 00:21:56,080 Wood said it was a rotten painting carried only by satire. 154 00:21:56,080 --> 00:22:04,210 In that sense, it is rotten, very rotten indeed, in the sense of being quite naughty. 155 00:22:04,210 --> 00:22:07,360 Three elderly DSR ladies, 156 00:22:07,360 --> 00:22:21,570 one preciously holding a delicate cup of tea in front of what else amounted coloured print of loiters Washington crossing the Delaware. 157 00:22:21,570 --> 00:22:33,720 The v shaped clearing of space in the centre between the second and third woman is an inversion not only of the triangular composition of Loyd's says, 158 00:22:33,720 --> 00:22:43,470 painting in the background, but also the similar shape formed by Washington's legs splayed out in the boat. 159 00:22:43,470 --> 00:22:55,710 The satirical point is all too clear, the image of Washington as the saintly hero only continued to be relevant to decidedly unmodern Ortiz, 160 00:22:55,710 --> 00:23:06,190 who would recoil from the certain aspects of Washington's real body, so to speak. 161 00:23:06,190 --> 00:23:11,380 If there is a defining feature of Washington in the 20th century, 162 00:23:11,380 --> 00:23:19,900 then it might be identified as the tension that had characterised his images from the start between 163 00:23:19,900 --> 00:23:30,200 the search for a coherent American identity and the incoherence of a body in which to locate it. 164 00:23:30,200 --> 00:23:40,490 The great iconoclasm of abstraction born out of the mass destruction of two world wars refuted the 19th 165 00:23:40,490 --> 00:23:49,760 centuries doctrines of progress which could no longer account for the world's fundamental absurdity. 166 00:23:49,760 --> 00:23:59,650 Thus, rejected artists came into new conventions, processes and views about history itself. 167 00:23:59,650 --> 00:24:12,330 What is clear is that paintings like Loiters Washington crossing and in fact, the entire practise of painting could never again be so naive. 168 00:24:12,330 --> 00:24:23,010 In 1953, the artist Larry Rivers reinterpreted Lloyd says, grand manner painting in the language of a gestural abstraction. 169 00:24:23,010 --> 00:24:32,860 In his own painting titled Washington Crossing, the Delaware Rivers constructed a brick collage of the main elements in Lloyd, 170 00:24:32,860 --> 00:24:38,550 says Mammoth original general Washington appears alone in the boat. 171 00:24:38,550 --> 00:24:43,950 At the centre of Rivers, work turned to face the viewer. 172 00:24:43,950 --> 00:24:55,030 Human and equine figures scatter across ice floes denoted by rough swaths of thick white paint. 173 00:24:55,030 --> 00:25:02,500 Rivers seemed to leave the work and an overall state of incompletion figures in lines blur in 174 00:25:02,500 --> 00:25:11,470 an abstract expressionist style recognisably derived from Rivers mentor Willem de Kooning, 175 00:25:11,470 --> 00:25:23,770 thematically, just like we saw with Grant Wood. Rivers divorced his painting from the ideological bravura claimed of its source image. 176 00:25:23,770 --> 00:25:35,770 Rivers would do the undercut voices idealised form of history, demonstrating his fingers as plastic and ambiguous. 177 00:25:35,770 --> 00:25:40,990 Unlike Wood, however, Rivers's work is not satire. 178 00:25:40,990 --> 00:25:47,830 There's nothing obviously funny about it, but if it's not a parody, 179 00:25:47,830 --> 00:25:56,110 then it is a polemic deploying the overly emotional and even the hypermasculine stridency 180 00:25:56,110 --> 00:26:04,190 of history painting as a format that only has continued relevancy as a subversion. 181 00:26:04,190 --> 00:26:18,620 In Rivers's words, I couldn't picture anyone getting into a chilly river around Christmas time with anything resembling hand on chest heroics. 182 00:26:18,620 --> 00:26:34,550 The very term heroic in 1963, 1953 had a clear and proximate connexion to the patriotism of allied victory in World War Two. 183 00:26:34,550 --> 00:26:37,370 Within the arts, more specifically, 184 00:26:37,370 --> 00:26:50,480 the later 1940s and 1950s favoured a muscled up and heroic vision of American free expression crystallised by the abstract expressionists, 185 00:26:50,480 --> 00:26:59,730 huge canvases, gestural aesthetics and moody vision of the sublime. 186 00:26:59,730 --> 00:27:10,920 See, for example, one of the moodier ones, Barnhardt Newman's vier heroics, Seb Leanness, about eight feet high and 18 feet across. 187 00:27:10,920 --> 00:27:16,410 And if that's not the size of a history painting, then I don't know what is palpitating. 188 00:27:16,410 --> 00:27:24,850 Redfield interrupted periodically by narrow vertical stripes. 189 00:27:24,850 --> 00:27:33,430 When it was first exhibited, Newman wrote an accompanying text instructing viewers not to back away from it, 190 00:27:33,430 --> 00:27:46,090 as one might from a large painting, but rather to take it in from a close distance in order to allow themselves to be overwhelmed. 191 00:27:46,090 --> 00:27:53,270 This was an artwork meant to ravish and conquer. 192 00:27:53,270 --> 00:28:02,150 But now some would like would again, Rivers's commentary holds up a critique of American hero ism, 193 00:28:02,150 --> 00:28:11,150 specifically by highlighting its overbearingly unbearably masculine tone. 194 00:28:11,150 --> 00:28:24,680 The sexuality implied by abstract expressionism in the 1950s and certainly comprehended of Newman's painting was not lost on the public. 195 00:28:24,680 --> 00:28:41,270 One reviewer mistranslated the Latin title vier heroics silliness to heroic men erect in order to criticise its lack of nuance parenthetically. 196 00:28:41,270 --> 00:28:50,450 Newman had intended it to mean, quite correctly, men heroic and sublime. 197 00:28:50,450 --> 00:28:58,160 As a rebuttal, Newman defended himself by calling the reviewers attack a castration. 198 00:28:58,160 --> 00:29:01,670 Now, I could go on about this interesting back and forth, 199 00:29:01,670 --> 00:29:11,300 but I will not suffice to say that Larry Rivers had an idea of the kind of critique he was after in Washington crossing. 200 00:29:11,300 --> 00:29:19,610 The artist remembers having been laughed at and labelled as a reactionary because he included a pastiche of a romantic painting. 201 00:29:19,610 --> 00:29:28,340 When others had radically done away with figuration in general, the public wasn't upset, Rivers recalled. 202 00:29:28,340 --> 00:29:44,950 But painters were. By painters, of course, rivers did not mean all painters, but rather the macho men accepted into the abstract expressionist fold. 203 00:29:44,950 --> 00:29:49,810 Note here in the now iconic photograph of the so-called irascible. 204 00:29:49,810 --> 00:29:59,740 The presence of only one woman had a stern. While he did enjoy some acceptance within this group. 205 00:29:59,740 --> 00:30:13,060 He also had one foot in a subterranean culture of gay artists, many of whom were his friends, collaborators and indeed his lovers. 206 00:30:13,060 --> 00:30:15,340 Rivers was bisexual. 207 00:30:15,340 --> 00:30:24,970 But perhaps that personal information is not really as useful as it is to know his belief that gay subcultures in the 1950s, to that point, 208 00:30:24,970 --> 00:30:35,170 the most overtly homophobic decade in American history represented an interesting metaphor for political and social nonconformity. 209 00:30:35,170 --> 00:30:40,660 For instance, Rivers called Loiter a lover of Napoleon. 210 00:30:40,660 --> 00:30:53,220 How else can we read this? But in the light of his later painting of 1964, the greatest homosexual, which is a painting of Napoleon. 211 00:30:53,220 --> 00:31:03,510 All of these are deliberate, if absurd provocations, Rivers wisht most of all to unmask even through hyperbole. 212 00:31:03,510 --> 00:31:13,240 The hypocrisy is a power in the buttoned up official American culture of the 1950s. 213 00:31:13,240 --> 00:31:21,910 One of the reasons why Rivers work shines in memory is because shortly after it was acquired by the Museum of Modern Art, 214 00:31:21,910 --> 00:31:31,520 it arrested the attention of the MOMA curator, Frank O'Hara, who was also a budding writer and critic. 215 00:31:31,520 --> 00:31:37,610 O'Hara's queerness, as well as his frequent collaboration's and on again, off again, 216 00:31:37,610 --> 00:31:44,890 romantic relationships with Rivers and other artists is well documented. 217 00:31:44,890 --> 00:31:55,830 The poem on seeing Washington crossing the Delaware at the Museum of Modern Art is grounded in a description of Rivers's painting, 218 00:31:55,830 --> 00:32:02,890 but soon becomes a personal letter to George Washington himself. 219 00:32:02,890 --> 00:32:11,020 Dear father of our country so alive, you must have lied incessantly to be immediate. 220 00:32:11,020 --> 00:32:19,180 Here are your bones crossed on my breast like a rusty flintlock, a pirate's flag, 221 00:32:19,180 --> 00:32:27,880 bravely specific and ever so light in the misty glare of a crossing by water in winter to assure. 222 00:32:27,880 --> 00:32:37,540 Other than that, the bridge reaches for. O'Hara professes familial love. 223 00:32:37,540 --> 00:32:46,950 He calls Washington his father. The poet's own living heart is a reliquary for Washington's remains. 224 00:32:46,950 --> 00:32:58,680 But there also exists profound disappointment in Harry's words, the reliquary is secretly a deadly arsenal. 225 00:32:58,680 --> 00:33:03,730 The boat is disoriented elsewhere in the poem. 226 00:33:03,730 --> 00:33:09,540 Ohara rages with cynicism. Still speaking to Washington. 227 00:33:09,540 --> 00:33:18,990 See how free we are. O'Hara exposes the mythic hero who once spoke for all Americans. 228 00:33:18,990 --> 00:33:26,970 As a lawyer. He speaks only for sub. 229 00:33:26,970 --> 00:33:32,080 But wait a pirate's high O'Hara's invocation of the Jolly Roger. 230 00:33:32,080 --> 00:33:37,720 Although it would seem in passing, reminds us of a different flag. 231 00:33:37,720 --> 00:33:45,280 Strangely absent from Rivers's composition, Washington's body is still there from the original. 232 00:33:45,280 --> 00:33:57,790 But the all important American flag that provides the top of the pyramid and therefore the pinnacle of Washington's achievement has now disappeared. 233 00:33:57,790 --> 00:34:04,450 Surely it is the American flag that O'Hara insinuates in the mention of the pirates. 234 00:34:04,450 --> 00:34:17,200 Neither visible in rivers is pastiche, but notwithstanding an image squared with the sense of impending calamity elsewhere in the verse. 235 00:34:17,200 --> 00:34:20,780 But even more striking than the missing flag is how. 236 00:34:20,780 --> 00:34:34,740 Elsewhere in the tightly knit gay artistic subculture in which rivers and our herel worked, the American flag is an object of unrelenting focus. 237 00:34:34,740 --> 00:34:40,600 For example, take Jasper Johns as flag paintings in wax and Kostic, 238 00:34:40,600 --> 00:34:47,990 one of pasted newsprint ground which take the general form and design of an iconic object, 239 00:34:47,990 --> 00:34:57,130 but with a deadpan attitude, just another artefact in the visual world ready to be rendered. 240 00:34:57,130 --> 00:35:01,930 John's conflated the idea of flag and painting, 241 00:35:01,930 --> 00:35:14,230 making instead a depersonalised waxy double one that looks like a flag as an antiquated specimen shrink wrapped in plastic. 242 00:35:14,230 --> 00:35:23,500 He therefore replaced the cultural meaning of the flag by relieving a well-known symbol from its symbolic function. 243 00:35:23,500 --> 00:35:34,480 Just as Lloyd is painting from the 19th century had been relieved of its symbolic functioning in the 20th to salute. 244 00:35:34,480 --> 00:35:41,440 Jones is painting of a flag would be an irrational gesture. 245 00:35:41,440 --> 00:35:56,710 And yet, for all of its somewhat cynical silence, Johns seems to be able in some way to protect the personality behind his many flag shaped works. 246 00:35:56,710 --> 00:36:01,450 One direct example is in memory of my feelings. 247 00:36:01,450 --> 00:36:08,620 Frank O'Hara, 1961, a monochromatic painting in oil and canvas, 248 00:36:08,620 --> 00:36:21,520 adopting the general format of the American flag with the addition of a stacked fork and spoon and hinged mysteriously in the centre. 249 00:36:21,520 --> 00:36:33,790 Colour peeking out from the lower right hand edge of the canvas suggests that it was painted over the preliminary groundwork of a flag painting, 250 00:36:33,790 --> 00:36:45,370 which was not uncommon for Johns to do at the time. Despite the dedicated title spelled out in stencils on the lower left, the. 251 00:36:45,370 --> 00:36:52,420 A parent of use occasion had also to do with the homophobia of the era. 252 00:36:52,420 --> 00:37:03,790 Johns, who was gay, would have known that a more emotional overture to one of his male friends would have been the ultimate tell. 253 00:37:03,790 --> 00:37:11,980 And yet the painting is still a tribute, one that the pre-eminent critic, Leo Steinberg, might have called loving. 254 00:37:11,980 --> 00:37:24,030 Notice the cuddling fork and spoon. Jones is painting again, resists the generally expressive purpose of the American flag, 255 00:37:24,030 --> 00:37:36,400 whose shape it adopts only to recuperate the personal and equally expressive purpose of those small little indications of a private life. 256 00:37:36,400 --> 00:37:46,490 Within the first line of O'Hara's poem reads, My quietness as a man in. 257 00:37:46,490 --> 00:37:54,000 One wonders what we would see if we could open the painting up at the hinges. 258 00:37:54,000 --> 00:37:58,470 That pretends, of course, that there is an inside to see. 259 00:37:58,470 --> 00:38:06,790 What do I mean? Washington's ghost is summoned once more to return to Frank Stellas Delaware Crossing. 260 00:38:06,790 --> 00:38:19,870 1962, a painting. So external and it's obvious geometric arrangement that it might almost render its title pointless. 261 00:38:19,870 --> 00:38:27,290 The painting measuring a six and a half feet squared is an extension of the monochromatic work. 262 00:38:27,290 --> 00:38:37,820 Stella undertook in 1958 the austere black paintings which made the then 22 year old artist instantly 263 00:38:37,820 --> 00:38:46,490 notorious in the New York art world and a leading painter in the emerging minimalist movement. 264 00:38:46,490 --> 00:38:54,890 Delaware crossing is one of six. Benjamin, more paintings, so-called, because they take as their colours. 265 00:38:54,890 --> 00:39:00,650 Benjamin More house paints directly from the can into the canvas. 266 00:39:00,650 --> 00:39:11,300 One painting for each type of spectral colour. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple. 267 00:39:11,300 --> 00:39:16,670 The other paintings in this series have titles referencing the Civil War, 268 00:39:16,670 --> 00:39:29,050 but only Delaware Crossing maintains a reference to Revolutionary War history and at that to history painting. 269 00:39:29,050 --> 00:39:37,030 When asked in 1964 about the meaning of his striped paintings, Stella famously said, 270 00:39:37,030 --> 00:39:45,940 What you see is what you see, a dictum that has come to stand in for minimalist art as a whole. 271 00:39:45,940 --> 00:40:00,550 And yet I think there is still a history lurking behind this one, located out of focus behind the centre of our gaze. 272 00:40:00,550 --> 00:40:08,890 Much has been made of the black paintings in contemporary art, especially their sheer and radical literalism, 273 00:40:08,890 --> 00:40:16,030 working from the pre-determined format of the size of the canvas. 274 00:40:16,030 --> 00:40:21,880 Much has also been made of their downbeat titles, sometimes in general, 275 00:40:21,880 --> 00:40:29,950 like the marriage of reason and squalor in the vaguely apocalyptic cadence of William Blake. 276 00:40:29,950 --> 00:40:34,660 And sometimes too specific to be legible to us anymore. 277 00:40:34,660 --> 00:40:42,660 Such as Thomas and Cort Park, the name of a public housing project in New York City. 278 00:40:42,660 --> 00:40:54,330 But others are specific and legible. And I think one stands out as unsettlingly so defined a HA. 279 00:40:54,330 --> 00:41:06,870 Nineteen fifty nine. The title in English. The Flag on High, which is the first line of the national anthem of Nazi Germany. 280 00:41:06,870 --> 00:41:15,480 Stella deploys the same basic design scheme in his rendering of Delaware crossing. 281 00:41:15,480 --> 00:41:22,510 Such a comparison cannot be merely anodyne. 282 00:41:22,510 --> 00:41:30,640 If we see Stella as having internalised the approach of Larry Rivers and Jasper Johns, 283 00:41:30,640 --> 00:41:40,930 then we might conclude that Delaware crossing is yet another mid century variation on the theme of Washington's I chronicity. 284 00:41:40,930 --> 00:41:48,130 By now, standard repudiation of seductive presidential power read through the new lens of the 285 00:41:48,130 --> 00:41:55,770 disastrous totalitarianism of Nazi Germany and the massive fact of the Holocaust. 286 00:41:55,770 --> 00:42:06,420 But that doesn't seem to fit exactly the store, the historical stakes seem to demand something else. 287 00:42:06,420 --> 00:42:19,330 Another option is to go back one step. We might conclude then that Delaware crossing is a response to the previous generations abstract expressionism. 288 00:42:19,330 --> 00:42:25,950 A criticism against the will of this type of art to fully subjugate the mind. 289 00:42:25,950 --> 00:42:38,970 And I of course, that was not the explicit goal, as Newman himself protested, but it was nonetheless latent or option three. 290 00:42:38,970 --> 00:42:49,320 The most extreme, externalised and diagrammed, completely emptied of subject and emotion. 291 00:42:49,320 --> 00:43:01,740 Even the high minded subjects and emotions brought forth by the title Delaware Crossing casts doubt on whether a contemporary artist 292 00:43:01,740 --> 00:43:12,990 should anymore retain the utopian right to represent the private self within a world so thoroughly corrupted by unilateral power, 293 00:43:12,990 --> 00:43:26,860 tragedy and mass murder. Where we encounter this same concept, albeit in a slightly more accessible way, is in pop art. 294 00:43:26,860 --> 00:43:30,340 It should tell us something that Andy Warhol liked. 295 00:43:30,340 --> 00:43:41,590 Delaware crossing so much that he purchased from Stella a miniaturised series of the Benjamin Moore paintings. 296 00:43:41,590 --> 00:43:47,440 Warhol always the cypher, was at the same time in the early 1960s, 297 00:43:47,440 --> 00:43:55,390 making his way through similar issues of how to represent the American public back to itself. 298 00:43:55,390 --> 00:44:08,170 Whether that is in the deadpan language of commercial culture, as in his Campbell's soup cans or in media images of collective tragedy, 299 00:44:08,170 --> 00:44:17,300 as in his treatments of Post assassination magazine photographs of Jacqueline Kennedy. 300 00:44:17,300 --> 00:44:28,760 On the one hand, Warhol holds a dark mirror up to the homogenising crush of consumerism that matured in America in the 1960s. 301 00:44:28,760 --> 00:44:43,780 But on the other, Warhol ruptures the glossiness of these objects, both objects for sale and objects of desire, sometimes to their limit. 302 00:44:43,780 --> 00:44:52,020 To suggest, I think, that there is still a story left to tell. 303 00:44:52,020 --> 00:45:01,530 His remarkable race, riot paintings of 1963 64 are an appropriate choice here. 304 00:45:01,530 --> 00:45:07,380 These silkscreen canvases are based on photographs of atrocities committed against 305 00:45:07,380 --> 00:45:14,040 young black protesters in the Birmingham campaign of the civil rights movement. 306 00:45:14,040 --> 00:45:30,300 As published in Life magazine in 1963, to quote Warhol in art news, in the same year, when you see a gruesome picture over and over again, 307 00:45:30,300 --> 00:45:38,220 it doesn't have any effect which may have equated with the apathy of our contemporary culture, 308 00:45:38,220 --> 00:45:46,160 defined as it is by images on pages and nowadays screens. 309 00:45:46,160 --> 00:45:51,320 What I think Warhol really meant, though, was that it doesn't have any effect. 310 00:45:51,320 --> 00:45:58,550 But should people did actually go down south to help with the civil rights movement 311 00:45:58,550 --> 00:46:07,040 because they saw moving photographs of the injustices in magazines and on TV? 312 00:46:07,040 --> 00:46:14,990 There is and always has been an interest in popular images and what they make us feel or don't. 313 00:46:14,990 --> 00:46:23,500 But there is equally always a bit of space left for us to resist, to bounce back. 314 00:46:23,500 --> 00:46:28,580 And at his very best, this is what Warhol wants us to see. 315 00:46:28,580 --> 00:46:35,570 To that end, the race riots rejuvenate our understanding of the American mission. 316 00:46:35,570 --> 00:46:43,590 After all. Warhol silkscreen them in red, white and blue. 317 00:46:43,590 --> 00:46:49,620 With George Washington's body disappeared. Other bodies emerge. 318 00:46:49,620 --> 00:46:58,200 Let me finish with a final picture. The African-American painter Robert Cole, Scotts, George Washington Carver, 319 00:46:58,200 --> 00:47:08,070 crossing the Delaware page from an American history textbook and iconoclastic painting of 1974, 320 00:47:08,070 --> 00:47:21,170 first exhibited in 1975, a year that brings us very close to the patriotic American bicentennial celebrations of 1976. 321 00:47:21,170 --> 00:47:28,230 In it, we see yet another pastiche of the now well recognised scene only now. 322 00:47:28,230 --> 00:47:33,630 It is another Washington at the helm. George Washington Carver, 323 00:47:33,630 --> 00:47:46,570 a prominent black scientist who was born into slavery but who became a highly regarded botanist and agricultural adviser to three U.S. presidents. 324 00:47:46,570 --> 00:47:53,690 Cole Scott's rendition, however, complicates any sense of heroism nor even pride. 325 00:47:53,690 --> 00:48:01,120 By painting the attending figures with the crudest exaggeration of blackface minstrelsy, 326 00:48:01,120 --> 00:48:14,490 a body theatrical performance style from the late 19th and early 20th centuries intended to mock people of African descent to black Americans, 327 00:48:14,490 --> 00:48:23,890 not only the name, but also the idea of Washington has a different resonance entirely. 328 00:48:23,890 --> 00:48:32,980 At the conclusion of the Civil War, formerly enslaved people had only one name, their Christian name. 329 00:48:32,980 --> 00:48:38,800 There was no surname because enslavers deprive them of a personal history and a 330 00:48:38,800 --> 00:48:46,990 sense of legacy as a part of the broader demoralisation of forced servitude. 331 00:48:46,990 --> 00:48:58,330 Many Africans then chose the surname Washington, and because many enslaved persons also did not know their birthday as property. 332 00:48:58,330 --> 00:49:08,180 This idea was only abstract. Many chose the date July 4th, Independence Day. 333 00:49:08,180 --> 00:49:19,190 These 19th century African-Americans, of course, were not naive to the fact that the first president was a slave owner himself. 334 00:49:19,190 --> 00:49:26,450 Rather, their decisions reflected a core belief in the revolutionary American experiment in life, 335 00:49:26,450 --> 00:49:35,610 liberty and the pursuit of happiness to which all United States citizens are supposedly entitled. 336 00:49:35,610 --> 00:49:43,030 Cole's Scott painting in the 1970s new that these promised endowments were slow. 337 00:49:43,030 --> 00:49:53,970 If at all, to come to the many descendants of these Washington's racism haunted and still haunts America, 338 00:49:53,970 --> 00:50:03,960 a racism lodged at America's core, like the naive patriotism in George Washington crossing the Delaware. 339 00:50:03,960 --> 00:50:15,550 It is a well-worn habit, subliminal and so completely devastating. 340 00:50:15,550 --> 00:50:23,480 Was it doubted that those who corrupt their own bodies conceal themselves? 341 00:50:23,480 --> 00:50:29,180 Wrote the great American bard Walt Whitman in 1855. 342 00:50:29,180 --> 00:50:35,590 And if those who defile the living are as bad as they who defiled the dead. 343 00:50:35,590 --> 00:50:41,880 And if the body does not do fully as much as the sole. 344 00:50:41,880 --> 00:50:48,580 And if the body were not the sole. What is this all? 345 00:50:48,580 --> 00:50:56,950 Along the course of this series, I have attempted to demonstrate the many bodies of a nation, the suicidal and the weak, 346 00:50:56,950 --> 00:51:07,280 the oppressed bodies filled with radiant hope, bodies that have or do not have a right to representation. 347 00:51:07,280 --> 00:51:21,334 Other bodies remain. But Wittman's question fills me now regarding the body of a nation.